Why Speedos?

Why is there a greater tendency for Europeans to wear more revealing “Speedos” while USians tend to wear less revealing swimming trunks?

As with many aggressively expansionist cultures throughout history, the US is permeated by extensive modes of cultural regulation. Cultures maintain their identity by deploying a wide range of stylised behaviours that serve to distinguish “us” from “them”. A regime of depilatory and hair care rituals is one such common and quite successful technique that recurs repeatedly. Not for nothing did the Mediterranean cultures of the Classical period refer to those outside their cultural empire as “barbarians”, or “hairy ones”, with the implication that non-Roman or non-Greek grooming was deficient or non-existent. Which, of course, it was not.

What I have noticed in the US is that there is a greater tendency for people to fetishize the absence of hair on their sacred and profane flesh. An absence of hair where simple biology would place it implies a careful regimen of (sometimes painful) grooming, and this then establishes a cultural cachet about the person, a habitus of style and breeding. Both males and females in the US seem to engage more frequently in displays of both hair absence and hair presence (longer and more groomed hair on heads, for example).

The Speedo manages to display a liminal area of the body that verges on the sacred, and whose display presumably gives a cue about the current hair coverage of the genitals. In much of the US, this area is “supposed” to be enmeshed within a depilatory regime that fetishizes it to some tight grooming or paedophilic exhibition of complete depilation. Many people are unable or unwilling to devote the time and pain “necessary” to groom their genitals to conform to the expectations of the culture, and wearing Speedos would expose them to public discovery.

Hence the popularity of more extensive loin coverings. Boxers and swimming trunks hide a multitiude of sins against the culture. And I am not even going to get into public displays of fat.